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ASPM is not supported PCIe 1.0 devices. It was introduced with 1.1.
This way a lot of older NVidia PCIe cards, at least up to GeForce 6 (not sure about GeForce 7), do not support it.
When you do not use pcie_aspm=force, Linux correctly detects PCIe 1.0 and disables ASPM. It only affects this device and is not globally: so your BIOS is OK.

The same thing happens on some (wired & wireless) networking cards, and many other early PCIe devices.

Comment

ASPM is not supported PCIe 1.0 devices. It was introduced with 1.1.
This way a lot of older NVidia PCIe cards, at least up to GeForce 6 (not sure about GeForce 7), do not support it.
When you do not use pcie_aspm=force, Linux correctly detects PCIe 1.0 and disables ASPM. It only affects this device and is not globally: so your BIOS is OK.

The same thing happens on some (wired & wireless) networking cards, and many other early PCIe devices.

I have an nVidia GeForce 7900GS I bought in late 2007 and would that fall under 1.0 or 1.1 PCIe specs?

Comment

I don't care a bit about what OS they support. What I do care about is that they support the specifications. If they don't that is clearly a bug and should be fixed by them.

That is true. But sadly nobody seems to really care about standards.
And some, like MS, create pseudo-standards (office open xml) with 6'000 pages but later not keeping to their own specs.
Then, in HW terms, there is ACPI (also made up by MS as one member of ACPI board and their faulty compilers for the tables) or other stuff. In the HW business it is probably often the case "just make W32 work with it and that's it". If Windows doesn't bitch forget the product and get on with the next generation of stuff. Short life/release cycles aren't doing much good here.
(free & open) Standards are a good thing, but it would be better for the world if people would be sticking with it.

Comment

I haven't heard of the motherboard vendors mentioned before, and they didn't come up with I was in the market for a new one. I bought a Gigabyte Z68 one anyway, despite them mailing to me:

Thank you for your kindly mail and inquiry. About the issue you mentioned, since our products only support Windows OS, we cannot guarantee Ubuntu to work on our system. We suggest you to install Windows OS to prevent having problems. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Regards,
GIGABYTE

So this is a general company stance and not a one-off thing. It's working out fine so far though, and I didn't think there were any mb vendors who were actually good what they do otherwise.